The McGovern Moment: Romney's No-Impact Primary

...except on the Tea Party, which he has cracked in half in his 10 days of organizing in South Carolina.GREENVILLE, S.C. — Willard Romney's campaign is headquartered here in a largely vacant, Spanish-themed stucco building downtown around the corner from a nice little restaurant row. The local campaign is run by a guy named Michael Joffrion, who can't talk about anything because that's the way campaigns roll these days. You talk to national staff or you don't talk at all. However, it is rather interesting that here in Greenville — which, in years past, was the most important place a primary campaign could put itself — the putative Republican frontrunner has had a headquarters in Greenville for only about 10 days.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

It's easy, and more than half-accurate, to say that Willard Romney doesn't need South Carolina. The state's conservative politics would do him no favors in any general election held any place where Jefferson Davis is not on the ballot. He can get the Republican nomination without winning here. (If he somehow manages to bungle Florida, where his financial airpower should carry him easily, then that's a different story. And he can bungle Florida if he keeps acting like a combination of Joe McCarthy and G.I. Luvmoney. Good Christ. Willard. North Korea? Somebody throw a bag on this man immediately. America's right. That guy is wrong. And Willard is a putz.) However, it is not remotely accurate to say that he has had no impact down here.

The very fact of Romney has cracked South Carolina's Tea Party electorate in half, and he's managed to divorce the existing religious right from the Tea Party faithful. In fact, what the frontrunner has done to the Republican party down here is a perfect fractal of what his campaign in the general election may do to the Republican party as a whole. He is going to force high-profile Republicans in the country to take a position in favor of a party's nominee that will put them in direct conflict with important parts of the party's base. In his own placid, unhurried way, and without presuming that the general election will end up like 1972, Willard Romney may well turn out in effect to be his party's modern George McGovern. Without the fundamental personal integrity, of course.

And of course the Tea Party's freshman governor, Nikki Haley, has seen the decline in her approval ratings only accelerate since she endorsed America's favorite glass-jawed stripper of companies, looter of pensions, and gombeen for the most unproductive "industry" in the history of man.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

"That was the last straw for a lot of people," says Talbert Black, Jr., a conservative author, activist, and a watchdog on South Carolina's state government. "She ran on a platform of fighting the system, of being the outsider, against a corrupt legislative leadership, for full parental choice in education, for a zero-based budgeting for the state, and against the government giving away big tax incentives to move to the state.

"Once she got the nomination, she stopped talking about those things, and people said, well, she needs to move to the middle, and she needs to do that to get elected. (Ed. Note: The middle? Nikki Haley is the middle? Somebody's missing a big point here.) She wouldn't talk about parental choice and, as soon as she got elected, every time a company that got a tax break and moved here, she was out there cutting the ribbon as 'the jobs governor.' Then, with this endorsement of Romney, which she didn't have to do, a lot of people were just shocked."

Black admits that he'll "be happy when Saturday's over," so the focus will move away from the presidential race back onto the state issues that are his main preoccupation, and the national focus will move on, so that the parochial concerns of South Carolinians will cease to be of concerns to people in the other 49 states. "People talk about the Tea Party leadership, but it's not monolithic here," he says. "There's some divisions here, and some bad feeling, but that's what happens when you have some people who want everything to go their way every time."

Somehow, the Republicans are going to realize that Willard's their only real shot this year. However, if he loses, it's going to be fascinating to watch going forward how much of an albatross having supported him in 2012 is going to be.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.